A reporter I’ve admired for a while is David Gelles. Then someone was kind enough to introduce us, and I learned of his practice of mindfulness. He’s got a new book coming out on Mindful work, and I wanted to get his take on how this practice can help us navigate the social era, powerfully. More

A reporter I’ve admired for a while is David Gelles. Then someone was kind enough to introduce us, and I learned of his practice of mindfulness. He’s got a new book coming out on Mindful work, and I wanted to get his take on how this practice can help us navigate the social era, powerfully.

Mindfulness seems all the rage. At a time when people are getting more connected, this seems ironic or at least surprising. Tell us why you think this is true…

A few things are contributing to the surging popularity of mindfulness today.

First, several decades worth of empirical evidence has made it clear that mindfulness and meditation can, in fact, reduce stress, improve focus, and even make us healthier. This growing tome of research has allowed businesses, governments, schools and other organizations to accept mindfulness and meditation as valid — and valuable — practices.

A second contributing factor, I believe, is that between 24/7 workdays, ubiquitous technology, and an onslaught of media, mindfulness is — for many of us, at least — more valuable today than ever before. By allowing us to slow down and focus on the present moment, mindfulness offers a welcome counterbalance to the hectic pace of our daily lives.

There were some great stats in the book that mindful work helps both individuals and organizations perform better. and do you find people “convinced” of this:

The studies are persuasive, but let’s look at one specific case study.

About 13,000 of the company’s 50,000 employees have taken either an 8-week mindfulness or yoga class. Those that stick with the programs report, on average “a 28 percent reduction in their stress levels, a 20 percent improvement in sleep quality and a 19 percent reduction in pain.”

They also become more productive, reclaiming an average of 62 minutes per week of working time, which Aetna estimates is worth $3,000 per employee per year. What’s more, the classes appear to have made the workforce healthier, and even helped the bottom line. In the first full year after the programs were rolled out at scale, health care costs fell 7.3 percent on a per employee basis. That amounted to about $9 million in savings for Aetna.

The CEO, Mr. Bertolini said that without his experience with yoga and meditation, he might not have been inspired to act on his impulse. “It’s made me question what I do and how I look at the world,” he said. “It’s made me consider my influence and how I treat people.” Aetna increased its minimum wage in the United States to $16 an hour, from $12. Thousands of customer service and claims administration workers around the country got raises, and Aetna would also reduce their out-of-pocket health care costs.

This resolves an apparent paradox: Aetna shows a business culture where taking a breath is part of making a buck.

How do you think mindfulness help people know their onlyness, live their onlyness?

There’s a phrase that goes something like: “Money makes people more of who they already are.” The same, I think, is true of mindfulness. Mindfulness allows us to be in the present moment, to stop dwelling in the past or worrying about the future. In those moments of clarity, we’re able to be our authentic selves.

How did your onlyness lead you to this book? And how has it changed you or your ideas?

I was looking for answers to life’s big questions from the time I was a teenager. But it wasn’t until I discovered mindfulness that I found anything that made a bit of sense. That was on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and shortly after that, I began meditating. A few years after that, I traipsed off to India for the better part of a year. There, I studied with Zen masters, Tibetan teachers, and one of the great mindfulness instructors of the 20th century — Anagarika Munindra-ji.

Since then, I’ve practiced mindfulness on and off — sometimes going through intensive periods of meditation and even going on retreat, and other times being less rigorous about formal practice.

But when I heard that some companies war bringing mindfulness into the office, I knew that this was a story I was meant to tell. As a business reporter — first at the Financial Times and now at the New York Times — I knew that the confluence of meditation’s rich history and the corporate world was a great story. I wrote a magazine article about it for the Financial Times, and soon after that, I had a deal to write Mindful Work.

If you had every reader do just 1 thing, what would it be?

Give it a shot!

There are lots of ways to begin a mindfulness practice. From Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) classes offered in cities around the globe, to apps like Headspace, there are lots of ways to get a taste of a practice that top businesses, athletes, world leaders and artists are finding great value in.

And, David has offered to hang around here, and answer questions about mindfulness. Just like Stewart Friedman did when his book came out on Leading the Life You Want, he’s sharing himself with the Yes & Know community. Thank you, David. And one of you will win a signed copy of David’s book. If you don’t want to risk missing out, buy your copy now. (link to buy).

Don’t tell my agent and people who expect me to be doing work on stuff I have due to them, but I read all 800 pages of Twitter’s S1. I know. I know. But, I couldn’t (or should I say, wouldn’t?) resist. Partly because I (a) love Twitter, (b) study the tech space for innovations, More

Don’t tell my agent and people who expect me to be doing work on stuff I have due to them, but I read all 800 pages of Twitter’s S1. I know. I know. But, I couldn’t (or should I say, wouldn’t?) resist. Partly because I (a) love Twitter, (b) study the tech space for innovations, and (c) wanted to shape my own take on investment-worthiness.

But I didn’t love what I found, it was super-yawn-inspiring at best, but also worrisome.

When Facebook filed, they had a “letter from Mark” sharing the ethos of the company which is the Hacker Way. (link here). It set a stake in the ground for what to expect. When Google filed, they included their code of conduct “don’t be evil” in their prospectus for their 2004 IPO (link, here). They did something remarkable back then by arranging two classes of stocks, so that they could focus on the long-term and forgo the focus on short-term gains. This signaled they wanted to focus on bigger long range issues (And they have: Loon, driver-less cars, etc are all a part of this work – known as X or Google[x], link here). Each was notable in tone and expectations setting.

For Twitter, an organization that says its service is “shaped by the people, for the people”, I found their work and structure sadly lacking the “people” they speak of. (It also worries me most that they didn’t follow Google’s lead with stock structure to prevent it from being vulnerable to the cyclical market issues of advertising businesses.)

It didn’t come as a surprise, then, to see the talented Claire Cain Miller’s at the NYT with her essay noting the absence of women on the board (link, here). It expands on the question Kara Swisher of WSJ / AllThingsD originally posed, will they add one pre-ipo? (link, here).

But what then followed has been a fiasco. Dick Costolo’s first public response was to hit back to a quote by pundit Vivek Wadhwa, as “the Carrot Top on academic sources” (link here).

I would have preferred he say something to the effect of “that’s strategic / important (to us)”. If the internal stories are to be believed (and I believe them), then Twitter has been on a search for an expanded board for some time. They want someone with global policy experience, since Twitter gives voices to the often-voiceless. But Costolo went on the defensive when — in all likelihood, he has a good handle on it. He probably gets it. But he’s not done acting on it.

What he doesn’t seem to get is how much people are done waiting for change to happen organically. No more words, they think. More action. Even when they love Twitter, they are willing to use it as an example of “what not to do”. or, perhaps, because they love Twitter, they are willing to use it as an example of “what not to do”.

So, when Time Inc reached out on this Sunday, and asked if I could write an op-ed, I said yes. First I could add another voice in the mix to advocate for a change I see as necessary. Also, I find the focus on gender to miss the larger point. Which is this: to make this a gender issue alone, discounts the innovation and economic impact.

An excerpt from that piece:

Most market measures evaluating performance are focused entirely on short-term results: do they have an edge, can they deliver financial profits and so on. Those measures miss one crucial element that determines long-term viability – the ability to innovate. Innovation is a direct result of openness to new ideas. The key is to design for differences of perspective, and world views so you can have a better chance at new ideas. If Twitter doesn’t change, it will fail.

And,

When you get a group of people together with similar backgrounds, all men, and low turnover, what you get is groupthink and continuity. And while an all white male board could conceivably have that ability to challenge one another, the likelihood is much higher if the board included a broader range of experiences. That, of course, has to include gender and color. But it should also include other industries.

And it’s probably worth noting, even though regular readers will know this…. I’d worry if the leadership of a company is all white women. My point is – and always has been – be open to the difference of ideas regardless of where those ideas come from – from the young and old, from the “qualified’ or less so, from privileged or not, and across different industries and regions. Build structures and processes to enable this. There’s a magic formula for the way ideas become real. And it includes the healthy friction of bad ideas being killed, or reshaped into better ones. (aka: MurderBoarding, which I wrote about it in New How.) Productive friction is not possible if groups are too alike or too divergent. A happy medium is necessary.

The bottom line is this: Everyone is biased, ample research proves this*. Dick Costolo is no exception. Neither are you. What differentiate the so-so leaders from the great leaders are the ones that acknowledge that they can’t/won’t see certain things (all by themselves), and then to design for inclusion. If you want to create more value, you need to find and develop new ideas — and to create a setting where potential leaders — including those who might otherwise be invisible – can be made seen.

What will you do to hear / see difference today? On a personal level, could you get involved in a more “fringe” group? I find myself regularly talking to very Santa-Cruzy type folks at one coffee bar I go to in town – people who believe all capitalism is bad. And while I actually see business as being able to do great good, I want to understand why they don’t. There’s some place like this where you live, right? When you will you hang out there?

Yesterday, the US Senate passed the online sales tax bill by a 69-27 vote. The measure will shape the e-commerce space, certainly affecting Ebay, Amazon, Etsy and others. The bill still needs to pass the GOP-controlled House of Representatives and receive the signature of President Obama, a supporter, to become law. The legislation would require More

Yesterday, the US Senate passed the online sales tax bill by a 69-27 vote.

The measure will shape the e-commerce space, certainly affecting Ebay, Amazon, Etsy and others. The bill still needs to pass the GOP-controlled House of Representatives and receive the signature of President Obama, a supporter, to become law. The legislation would require Web-based retailers with sales of at least $1M to collect sales taxes for the states where they ship goods and merchandise.

E-commerce accounted for $225B in revenues in 2012, according to the US Department of Commerce. To put this in practical terms using my state… California would experience between 15-20% of that volume, at 9.25% tax rate, so … well, it’s easy to do that math and know why this is a big deal. Amazon, which until recently was dead-set against a national online sales tax, now embraces it as it looks to expand its physical operations across the USA. eBay, Amazon’s rival, argues the tax would hinder its sellers who do more than $1 million in out-of-state sales annually. In a recent letter to eBay sellers, Chief Executive John Donahoe pushed the suggestion that the law should exempt any firms that have fewer than 50 employees or make less than $10 million annually on out-of-state sales. With no national way to establish the tax base, calculating taxes could become it’s own nightmare of a business problem (and I could imagine both Amazon and Intuit offerings to address the need). As you might imagine, national and regional chains are tired of being showrooms for shoppers (hello Best Buy!) so they’ll be lobbying hard to pass this legislation and thus change the market dynamic. They are sick of having customers shop in their stores and then search on their smartphones for lower prices to buy it online. (That said, I think the regional chains are mostly deluding themselves to think this is the core issue of their problems.) According to a recent University of Tennessee study, states missed out on over $11 billion in uncollected taxes in 2012 from online purchases.

There are many times when being small, and Gazelle-like is an edge in the Social Era. But this legislative issue is one that benefits the Gorillas’ of the world. It means that small independent players *need* the efficiency and capabilities of a big platform like Amazon or Ebay to be able to do their business, ideally handling this tax payment issue on their behalf. That makes me think that this tax issue changes the relationship from an interdependence to a reliance. Power will jump to the platform players like Amazon.

And that sound you are hearing is the tide changing. Ecommerce used to be the cheapest way to buy, but no longer will be. One to watch.

I’m sitting at home coughing and coughing. After a long 40 days on the road, I am now officially sick. About the only thing I have energy to do is to read, but luckily there are some amazing things people have written. The common thread is about knowing when and how to adapt (because adapt More

I’m sitting at home coughing and coughing. After a long 40 days on the road, I am now officially sick. About the only thing I have energy to do is to read, but luckily there are some amazing things people have written. The common thread is about knowing when and how to adapt (because adapt we must):

Innovation is a fight; Why Apple is eventually doomed.Oysters create pearls not because of the absence of bad stuff, but by the friction created by the foreign object. Pearls are the result of this biological process — the oyster’s way of protecting itself from foreign substances. I’m absolutely convinced that friction is necessary for innovation; without friction, the organization has nothing to respond to… here is RandsinRepose’s take:

“As someone who spends much of his time figuring out how to get teams to work together, the premium I’m placing on volatility might seem odd. I believe Apple benefits greatly from having a large, stable operational team that consistently and steadily gets shit done, but I also believe that in order to maintain its edge Apple needs a group of disruptors.”

More here: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2012/11/11/innovation_is_a_fight.html

Learning to Love Volatility
Nassim Taleb, writer of the Black Swan thesis has a new book out and the WSJ did a preview of it. The thesis is that inn a world that constantly throws big, unexpected events our way, we must learn to benefit from disorder. And that the things we think will help us survive, will not. My favorite part was Rule 3: Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.

“Experts in business and government are always talking about economies of scale. They say that increasing the size of projects and institutions brings costs savings. But the “efficient,” when too large, isn’t so efficient. Size produces visible benefits but also hidden risks; it increases exposure to the probability of large losses. Projects of $100 million seem rational, but they tend to have much higher percentage overruns than projects of, say, $10 million. Great size in itself, when it exceeds a certain threshold, produces fragility and can eradicate all the gains from economies of scale. To see how large things can be fragile, consider the difference between an elephant and a mouse: The former breaks a leg at the slightest fall, while the latter is unharmed by a drop several multiples of its height. This explains why we have so many more mice than elephants.”

Walmart Internal Compensation Reveals Systematic Limit on Advancement
When Sam Walmart started the company, he wanted to bring efficiency to commerce so that people who didn’t have the ability to feed their families or clothe their children could do so. Today, as the 2nd largest employer in the US (2nd only to the DOD), they are in a very different position. They are now, the world’s most successful retailer in history. I have long thought about their commitment to improve other people’s lives as noble, but that they appear to be missing an opportunity now that they are so successful. Today, as an industry titan they could do so much to improve the living conditions of people if they had health care and allowed people to earn a living wage. Sometimes organizations “how” get in the way of their “why”. Walmart’s original “why” was to serve its communities through improved economic conditions. At the time, their “how” was to do it through efficiency of the delivery. But today, I wonder if Walmart’s “how” is getting in the way of their original purpose of why they started this business: to help people lead better lives.

“The company website declares that “a job at Walmart opens the door to a better life” and “the chance to grow and build a career.” But interviews with 31 hourly workers and one former store manager reveal lives beset by paychecks too small to handle the bills, difficult to manage part-time schedules with hours subject to constant change, and little reason to hope for career advancement. Citing fear of losing their jobs, most spoke on the condition of anonymity.”

More here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/16/walmarts-internal-compensation-plan_n_2145086.html

I have to admit that I see red whenever I see people pick on big firms for not being able to innovate, or celebrate startups alone as “getting it”. I teach and advise entrepreneurs (from Stanford, in Silicon Valley, et al) and I’ve advised and worked with some of the best global Fortune 500 firms More

I have to admit that I see red whenever I see people pick on big firms for not being able to innovate, or celebrate startups alone as “getting it”.

I teach and advise entrepreneurs (from Stanford, in Silicon Valley, et al) and I’ve advised and worked with some of the best global Fortune 500 firms in the world. I’ve been an operating leader on both sides, unlike so many who comment on this topic. From now 20+ years of operational experience in the trenches , I can say with 100% confidence that either point of view is a form of ignorance and bigotry.

This piece which I first shared this morning on the Harvard platform address the bigotry head-on and pointing out that the bigger need is to figure out how to be adaptable to market conditions.

*****

You can find plenty of people who disregard bigger enterprises, stating they are not the future. Plenty of people — including on Harvard’s blog — espouse the theory that big companies can’t innovate.

This argument is both old and wrong. Joseph Schumpeter, the noted economist, said — in 1909 — that small companies were more inventive than large ones. But then, in 1942, Schumpeter reversed himself and argued that big companies had more ability and incentive to invest in new products. Today, there’s a similar bias; people assume that small companies are creative and big firms are slow and bureaucratic. A look at any performance measure shows that innovation can come from either size, and that both arguments are oversimplifications.

The key for every firm — regardless of size — is to figure out how to consistently create value in a demanding, ever-changing market. That is hard no matter what size you are, no matter what industry you’re in.

If we’re to actually get better at innovation, we need to understand the operating conditions that lead to it and move past the bigotry and biases. To do so, let’s look at two distinguished firms side by side to see how innovation is entirely independent of size and more a function of different operating rules.

IBM and HP are two amazing companies with long and meaningful histories. Both CEOs are notable in what they have done, and are doing to lead their companies and both companies rank highly on the Fortune 500 List. HP is #10 on the 2012 list, and IBM is number 19.

At HP, CEO Meg Whitman has had the unfortunate situation of following a string of CEOs who’ve had short runs at the company and appear to have moved the company in the wrong direction. That said, her first decision when she returned was to “stay the course”; that involved keeping its PC-making personal systems group because that “product line allowed better supplier cost negotiation with Intel, Seagate and others.” The logic was “together we are stronger”. Another of Whitman’s first actions was a cost-cutting exercise to “fix” HP. She aimed for 29,000 employee cuts, which would bring the number of HP layoffs to 120,000 over the past decade. And earlier this month, she shared plans for revenues and profits to decline for another year to then return to growth in three years, with the key to the turnaround being “stability”.

IBM has gone through its own turmoil. Back in 2002, when Sam Palmisano took over, IBM had four main businesses each organized on a global basis: hardware, software, services,such as back-office outsourcing, and personal computers. (The parallels to HP can easily be seen). They focused on a shift that was described as moving “the center of gravity” away from IBM. Customer-facing teams around the world were asked to deliver IBM’s solutions in myriad markets. To help frame the thinking of these dispersed IBMers, a three-day, 24-hour on-line town hall was held for some 150,000 employees — IBM called it a Jam — to define the values by which IBM would be operated and its people held accountable. IBM’s Smart Planet Initiative is said to have come from these jam sessions involving 200 universities from 40 countries.

The new CEO, Ginny Rometty has been quoted as saying that IBM believes it needs to persistently reinvent the value proposition and “take new things on.” And the CEO sees enabling a culture of collaborative innovation as key. “Culture,” Rometty has also said, has “become the defining issue that will distinguish the most successful businesses from the rest of the pack.” And “strategic beliefs may be more important than strategic planning when thinking about how you keep the long view,” she said. “Clients say, ‘What’s your strategy?’, and I say, ‘Ask me what I believe, first.’ That’s a far more enduring answer.”

Innovations are not a function of size or even industry-specific strategies, but an embodiment of a set of ideas.

Let’s go through the key distinctions as evidenced by HP and IBM and how the distinction between those ideas plays out in today’s Social Era:

1. Trying to Preserve Market Position vs. Cultivating the Ability to Adapt. While it’s true that size once created competitive barriers and correlated with market power, it no longer does. HP holding onto its PC division because it will help them manage supplier negotiations suggests that they are trying to preserve a cost position, rather than innovate on value. Research shows that what was once a sustainable competitive advantage has shifted from 30-40 year arcs to 12 years in most industries, and five years in the tech sector. Instead of worrying about power over their suppliers, HP needs to be focused on leaping to their next opportunity, which is what IBM persistently does. Organizations must acknowledge that any advantages are short-lived, and the thriving business is one that figures out how to persistently reinvent their product lines, and business models.

2. Seeing People as “Production Units” vs. Essential to the Success Equation. As HP continues to burn-n-churn people, they are signaling that people are cogs in the machine — dispensable and easily replaced. Imagine what that does to recruitment, let alone energetically to the people who work there? In the Social Era, the greatest asset isn’t the stuff you lock up — like the building or manufacturing capabilities — but the people who walk out the door each night still thinking of creative solutions and ideas that will make a difference. The role of leadership is to unlock that talent, just as IBM has done when they jointly built a shared understanding of “why we’re here” and connecting people through purpose. Culture, Talent, and Purpose matter crucially when what you are making is a function of creativity and ideas. Who we are is what we make, and if we treat talent like Kleenex, innovation doesn’t happen.

3. Organizations are Open to New Ideas vs. Closed. A vast portion of our economy is now freelance (the US range is between 45-50%), which shows that “work is freed from jobs.” In all the examples I give about Social Era, it’s clear that value can be created independent of “a job” and by the very way we structure innovation, we can pull in ideas from anywhere. By engaging with others — regardless of whether they work for or in our firms — we engage new ideas. I’ve written extensively about this, and so have others, so I’ll avoid repeating the case studies here… but the crux of the issue is that organizations need to stop thinking of who creates value as the people who work “for us.” Often new ideas and innovations can and do come from outside the perimeter of an organization — especially from people who, without vetting or permission, create unexpected value. Open is more than a way of thinking about crowdsourcing or open innovation, it’s a way of thinking about who is allowed to create value. IBM embodies this as their Smart Planet, Watson, and digital initiatives show (comprising about 20% of their revenue stream); HP continues to limit who is allowed to create value for the firm.

Here’s the bottom line.

IBM has recently reached the highest stock valuation in its 100+ year history. HP, on the other hand has lost 35% of its value since its new CEO and over 70% since 2010 — over $90 billion of value from its peak.

These outcomes are a result of a set of principles, not the commentary of one industry titan outsmarting another in product moves. In truth, strategies change, market moves happen, and industries change. But if an organization knows what principles of innovation work, then innovation follows — regardless of size.

It seems that HP believes one set of ideas and IBM another. This makes HP more a patchwork of people and products inside some corporate buildings, and IBM more a centrifugal force. Which is not to say that one will inevitably continue to thrive and the other decline. But it is true that the organizations using the right operating principles will continue to thrive.

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As is always true for my writing that I create with my editor over at Harvard, please leave comments there so I can manage 1 conversation. This honors the work I do with Sarah Green AND preserves my sanity.

Welcome to start-of-work-season, otherwise known as post-Labor-day energy. If I could, I’d send you some freshly sharpened pencils. But since I can’t, let me share, some must-reads of the week. Enjoy the weekend. Solving the Personal Innovators’ Dilemma. This essay is chock-full-of-insight. Breaks down what learning and innovating actually looks like vs. what we mythologize More

Welcome to start-of-work-season, otherwise known as post-Labor-day energy. If I could, I’d send you some freshly sharpened pencils. But since I can’t, let me share, some must-reads of the week. Enjoy the weekend.

Solving the Personal Innovators’ Dilemma.This essay is chock-full-of-insight. Breaks down what learning and innovating actually looks like vs. what we mythologize it as. There is a gap between deciding to pursue something new, and having mastery. For people who want to “already know”, this limits growth.

As we look to develop competence within a new domain of expertise, moving up a personal learning curve, initially progress is slow. But through deliberate practice, we gain traction, entering into a virtuous cycle that propels us into a sweet spot of accelerating competence and confidence. Then, as we approach mastery, the vicious cycle commences: the more habitual what we are doing becomes, the less we enjoy the “feel good” effects of learning: these two cycles constitute the S-curve.

Being RealWe sometimes forget the impact we can have by just being our raw and very real selves in front of each other. The world doesn’t need to see more of our perfect selves, it needs to see our real selves.

But this is what moved me: We think we move through the world unseen. But sometimes (just inches away even) is someone who can hold the hard stuff with you. Our vulnerability creates a space for connection. A tender place where others are allowed to step in and offer what they naturally want to give — their comfort, their kindness, their presence.

Saying No.I’m sure many of you have the same problem that I do; figuring out how to say no to all those requests that well meaning people ask of you. Here’s the list of the century of how to say no. I’m torn between which one rocks more. 33 and 38 are vying to be my favorite but #9 is actually closest to my reality. Use it well.